The part about `lambda` is certainly imprecise. You can use the ternary form of `a if b else c` and you can use comprehensions and/or functional style with `map` or `filter` or things from itertools if you want iteration in a `lambda`. Instead of putting statements inside the `lambda`, you should write whatever would be a statement as a helper function, and just refactor the `lambda` so that the sequence of statements you wanted will just be some expression.
I didn't check in Python 2, but in Python 3 anyway, `type()` of a `lambda` is definitely `function` and the `lambda` object has a `__code__` attribute with `co_code` containing the actual bytecode, so it's definitely a function.
For raising errors, once again you can just define a helper that does the raising -- the limitation here is the use of statements, not anything inherent to exceptions. For example:
In [56]: def r():
....: raise TypeError
....:
In [57]: f = lambda x: x[0] if isinstance(x, list) else r()
In [58]: f([1])
Out[58]: 1
In [59]: f("hi")
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-59-987cd5963ca4> in <module>()
----> 1 f("hi")
<ipython-input-57-b0e388d24fbc> in <lambda>(x)
----> 1 f = lambda x: x[0] if isinstance(x, list) else r()
<ipython-input-56-a540441a09db> in r()
1 def r():
----> 2 raise TypeError
3
TypeError:
The same idea would work with context managers, etc.
FWIW, having used Python for a long time, I see the limitations on `lambda` as very good things. `lambda` should almost never be used for complex, side-effectful logic, and instead should be used when a short expression needs to be encapsulated and it's easier to do so with an anonymous function than a full function definition, and to a lesser extent sometimes for some tricky metaprogramming use cases, like dynamically binding functions at run time.
I'm sure that high-quality Javascript style probably implicitly uses these same kinds of limitations, even if the language itself doesn't make it mandatory.